Tomris Laffly

The first thing you need to know about Expendables 4 is that its studio somehow made the grating decision to fashion its title as Expend4ble. It’s a needless spelling challenge for a dull and vulgar flick with a lot of empty-calories muscle, but little-to-no skill or fun to spare.

While it’s based on the bizarre 2007 story of the female astronaut who drove 900 miles in adult diapers to confront an ex-boyfriend, Lucy in the Sky doesn’t include that intimate detail. Then again, the movie shits the bed in so many other ways, it may have been overkill. Director Noah Hawley (TV’s Fargo) omits the headline-making undergarment, instead stocking up on paper-thin observations about workplace misogyny and mental health in a cloying feature debut that begs to be scorned.

The weapons look fake, the stiff action sequences play like poor re-enactments, and you frequently wonder how anyone managed to keep a straight face while firing off some embarrassingly simple-minded lines of dialogue. Even the bright red, corn-syrupy blood splattered around looks like it’s from a different decade of cinema.